Even at the risk of that accusation we on this side of the House have always taken and will always assert an entirely different position in regard to the taxation of land and of liquor licences from that of the taxation of other classes of property.  The immemorial custom of nearly every modern State, the mature conclusions of many of the greatest thinkers, have placed the tenure, transfer, and obligations of land in a wholly different category from other classes of property.  The mere obvious physical distinction between land, which is a vital necessity of every human being and which at the same time is strictly limited in extent, and other property is in itself sufficient to justify a clear differentiation in its treatment, and in the view taken by the State of the conditions which should govern the tenure of land from that which should regulate traffic in other forms of property.  When the right hon. gentleman seeks by comparisons to show that the same reasoning which has been applied to land ought also in logic and by every argument of symmetry to be applied to the unearned increment derived from other processes which are at work in our modern civilisation, he only shows by each example he takes how different are the conditions which attach to the possession of land and speculation in the value of land from those which attach to other forms of business speculation.

“If,” he inquires, “you tax the unearned increment on land, why don’t you tax the unearned increment from a large block of stocks?  I buy a piece of land; the value rises; I buy stocks; their value rises.”  But the operations are entirely dissimilar.  In the first speculation the unearned increment derived from land arises from a wholly sterile process, from the mere withholding of a commodity which is needed by the community.  In the second case, the investor in a block of shares does not withhold from the community what the community needs.  The one operation is in restraint of trade and in conflict with the general interest, and the other is part of a natural and healthy process, by which the economic plant of the world is nourished and from year to year successfully and notably increased.

Then the right hon. gentleman instanced the case of a new railway and a country district enriched by that railway.  The railway, he explained, is built to open up a new district; and the farmers and landowners in that district are endowed with unearned increment in consequence of the building of the railway.  But if after a while their business aptitude and industry creates a large carrying trade, then the railway, he contends, gets its unearned increment in its turn.  But the right hon. gentleman cannot call the increment unearned which the railway acquires through the regular service of carrying goods, rendering a service on each occasion in proportion to the tonnage of goods it carries, making a profit by an active extension of the scale of its useful business—­he cannot surely compare that process with the process of getting rich merely by sitting still.  It is clear that the analogy is not true.